Today is Friday, December 6th. It's been a VERY long week. My week started on Sunday when myself and two other colleagues left Amherst to travel to the VSTE conference in Virginia Beach. It was an amazing conference! We arrived in VA Beach around 12:30 and headed straight into our first session. Each session was an hour in length. We had four sessions on Sunday. On Monday we attended 6 and finished on Tuesday with 4 more. The conference was sandwiched in between two amazing instructional technologists! Steve Dembo from Discovery Learning opened VSTE this year and Tammy Worcester, an ITRT from Kansas closed the conference. All of the notes and handouts are on Edmodo so it was nice not having to take notes during the sessions. That left the time open to play with the tools each presentor highlighted. Some years the conference isn't so good as all the sessions are vendor sessions. I don't like sitting through an hour long ad on a product I know my division isn't going to purchase. However, this year's conference was EXCELLENT! Lots of free sites and tools were recommended. This may be my last VSTE conference, which is sad. This year I turned in my intent form and requested to return to the classroom. There is a multitude of reasons for this request but I am excited.

At one of my schools I am less of an ITRT and more of a reading specialist. This is okay for the most part although I am not qualified as a reading specialist. I hate the thought that I may not be all that my students need. Anyway, at this school I have three groups of students for 80 minutes each. The groups are working on a targeted skill. One of these is a group of third graders. They are ABSOLUTELY the sweetest bunch of kids you would ever want to meet. Today we were working on asking and answering questions. We read a biography about President Barack Obama from Reading A to Z. Studentes were to come up with some questions before reading and I asked them to phrase their questions as if the President were in the room with us. Some of these questions were so sweet that I had to share!1. How does it fee to live in a big house with a small family?2. Do you have a lot of work to do and is it scary?3. What do you do when you get to be by yourself?3. When your wife goes to work and your children go to school, do you get bored?4. Do you have a game room?5. Did you pardon a turkey this year? Did your turkey have a name? Did you keep it for a pet?6. Do you think you are a good president?7. How does it feel to think you are doing good things when some people say you are doing bad things?8. What did you have to do to get to be president?9. Do you get scared talking in front of all those people?10. Did you have trouble learning anything at school, like reading?This last question came from a child after the reading of the story.1. The book says that when you lived in Indonesia you were poor. How does it feel to be rich? Do you help people by giving them some of your money?

Research now shows that children have a Facebook account at the age of 3.

If Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives, they will have to change. Just do it. Research is showing that jobs and colleges are now recruiting from social media.

Students don't need to learn from media. They need to become media masters. Teach kids to express themselves online. And not just students: because education is under attack, we need to be marketing ourselves.

Melanie Lewis

Hi, my name is Melanie Lewis. I am an Instructional Technology Resource Teacher for Amherst County Public Schools, located in the beautiful state of Virginia. I LOVE my job! I get to work on my hobby, anything that has to do with computers. I get to work with teachers and students, and I am definitely a people person. Plus, I DO NOT have to give grades. Wonderful, huh? Let me know how I can help you better integrate technology into your classroom.